Unpublishing as Form: Hart Crane, Jack Spicer, and the Thresholds of Periodical Publication.

This article examines how magazine rejections and the concept of the unpublished fragment influenced the poetic forms of Hart Crane and Jack Spicer, particularly in their experiments with the long poem. Both poets engaged deeply with small avant-garde magazines and larger literary institutions, transforming practical challenges of submission, rejection, and publication into aesthetic strategies that shaped the structure and reception of their work. Crane’s fragmented, Cubist approach to *The Bridge* involved scattering poem sections across various periodicals, using the gaps and reassemblies as formal elements, while Spicer’s *Book of Magazine Verse* intentionally embraced rejection as a creative principle, composing poems designed to be refused by mainstream journals. Their practices highlight the interplay between poetic form, publishing cultures, and queer poetics, revealing how material and institutional constraints can generate innovative, process-oriented poetry that resists closure and linearity.